This is the expanding online archive of the life and works of Junetta Gillespie, notably prose and poetry not featured in her book Depression's Child.

As time permits, and as the Spineless Books site is rebuilt, I will continue to assemble all extant manuscripts into this space.

Junetta Gillespie died in 2016. She wrote all her adult life. She is my mother.

Here is the last fragment of poetry she wrote about six months before she became bird.

 

My mind is going;  I watch it crumble and flake
Like snow before my eyes.

You’d think that after all this time and conversation
I would learn to view these flakes with sorrow,
Not delight..

Snow is the ornament of winter;
Weather and wind destroy them both.
Without mind, the body is worthless.
They go together.

Still, there’s  some  residue of beauty
Memory leaves behind.